Happiest of happy Halloweens! I hope your day is filled with fun-sized milky ways, plastic pumpkins, and face paint.

It's been a good week. Last Monday night I was fortunate enough to participate in a creative non-fiction writing exercise with the Ziji Collective. The experience was like tossing scarves into the wind on an autumn day; simultaneously cozy and freeing.

The exercise was to simply write out "I remember _______." They were truths, and often short little stories. For example:

I remember wanting to read the famous sex scene in Judy Blume's Forever, but not being able to because the book wasn't allowed in my middle school library.

I remember entering a chat room for the first time.

I remember when my high school history teacher threw a baby doll off the porch of our trailer-classroom in order to demonstrate what happened to unfit, Spartan babies.

We took turns reading from a book of "I remembers" and then sharing our own. What came across was a sense of connection; many of us had eyeballed the weird looking old guy on the bus or re-visited a sex scene in some piece of fiction. We had once felt cool, and then stupid, and then cool once again, and then confused.

As Halloween approaches, I'm sure we all have many "I remembers." This holiday is the launch pad into the fall season. It's when the walk home from school felt somewhat spookier and you sorted you candy for an elementary school activity. It's a party where they've somehow made hotdogs into sexy costumes and cupcakes with lime green frosting.

In LA, we had our first lick of Fall yesterday. While I was babysitting, Dylan and I went on a walk, and we had to put on our long sleeves for the journey out into the surprisingly crisp weather of the Santa Monica late afternoon. His family is having a Halloween party tomorrow night, so we also made chocolate covered "oreos" for celebration munchies. Quotes are necessary because these oreos were of the gluten and dairy free variety so that mom could enjoy some as well. Halloween snacks are far more fun when everyone dive right in. (I remember how sad I was when it was the era of braces and I sat looking longingly at a plate of candy apples.)

Because everything was so damn precious, I had to take pictures.

"Do you always take pictures when you bake things?" Dylan asked me.

"For the most part," I said. The shutter clicked. Dylan, ever curious, pulled out his dad's camera (a big fancy thing) and started to follow suit. We had a nice time.